MACKINTOSH'S HISTORY OF THE REVOLUTION IN ENGLAND, IN 1688.* [EDINBURGH REVIEW, 1835.] Ir is with unfeigned diffidence that we venture to give our opinion of the last work of Sir James Mackintosh. We have in vain tried to perform what ought to be to a critic an easy and habitual act. We have in vain tried to separate the book from the writer, and to judge of it as if it bore some unknown name. But it is to no purpose. All the lines of that venerable countenance are before us. All the little peculiar cadences of that voice, from which scholars and statesmen loved to receive the lessons of a serene and benevolent wisdom, are in our ears. We will attempt to preserve strict impartiality. But we are not ashamed to own, that we approach this relic of a virtuous and most accomplished man with feelings of respect and gratitude which may possibly pervert our judgment. at mess in Hampshire, or on the Treasury. bench and at Brookes's during the storms which overthrew Lord North and Lord Shelburne had been passed in the Bodleian Library, he might have avoided some inaccuracies; he might have enriched his notes with a greater number of references; but he never would have produced so lively a picture of the court, the camp, and the senate-house. In this respect Mr. Fox and Sir James Mackintosh had great advantages over almost every English historian who has written since the time of Burnet. Lord Lyttleton had indeed the same advantages; but he was incapable of using them.. Pedantry was so deeply fixed in his nature, that the hustings, the treasury, the exchequer, the House of Commons, the House of Lords, left him the same dreaming schoolboy that they found him. It is hardly possible to avoid instituting a comparison between this work and another When we compare the two interesting works celebrated Fragment. Our readers will easily of which we have been speaking, we have litguess that we allude to Mr. Fox's History of tle difficulty in awarding the superiority to that James II. The two books are written on the of Sir James Mackintosh. Indeed, the supesame subject. Both were posthumously pub-riority of Mr. Fox to Sir James as an orator is Jishe. Neither had received the last correc-hardly more clear than the superiority of Sir tions. The authors belonged to the same poli- James to Mr. Fox as an historian. Mr. Fox tical party, and held the same opinions con- with a pen in his hand, and Sir James on his cerning the merits and defects of the English legs in the House of Commons, were, we think, constitution, and concerning most of the pro- each out of his proper element. They were minent characters and events in English his-men, it is true, of far too much judgment and tory. They had thought much on the princi- ability to fail scandalously in any undertaking ples of government; but they were not mere to which they brought the whole power of their speculators. They had ransacked the archives minds. The History of James II. will always of rival kingdoms, and pored on folios which keep its place in our libraries as a valuable had mouldered for ages in deserted libraries; book; and Sir James Mackintosh succeeded in but they were not mere antiquaries. They winning and maintaining a high place among had one eminent qualification for writing his-the parliamentary speakers of his time. Yet tory-they had spoken history, acted history, we could never read a page of Mr. Fox's writlived history. The turns of political fortune, the ebb and flow of popular feeling, the hidden mechanism by which parties are moved, all these things were the subjects of their constant thought and of their most familiar conversation. Gibbon has remarked, that his history is much the better for his having been an officer in the militia and a member of the House of Commons. The remark is most just. We have not the smallest doubt that his campaign, though he never saw an enemy, and his parliamentary attendance, though he never made a speech, were of far more use to him than years of retirement and study would have been. If the time that he spent on parade and ing, we could never listen for a quarter of an hour to the speaking of Sir James, without feeling that there was a constant effort, a tug up hill. Nature, or habit which had become nature, asserted its rights. Mr. Fox wrote debates. Sir James Mackintosh spoke essays. As far as mere diction was concerned, indeed, Mr. Fox did his best to avoid those faults which the habit of public speaking is likely to generate. He was so nervously apprehensive of sliding into some colloquial incorrectness, of debasing his style by a mixture of parlia mentary slang, that he ran into the opposite error, and purified his vocabulary with a serupulosity unknown to any purist. 66 Ciceronem Allobroga dixit." He would not allow Addison, History of the Revolution in England, in 1688. Com- Bolingbroke, or Middleton, to be a sufficien' prising a view of the Reign of James the Second, from authority for an expression. He declared that his Accession, to the Enterprise of the Prince of Orange, he would use no word which was not to be found by the late Right Honourable Sir JAMES MACKINTOSH; and completed to the Settlement of the Crown, by the in Dryden. In any other person we should Editor. To which is prefixed a Notice of the Life, Writ-have called this solicitude mere 10ppery; and ings and Speeches of Sir James Mackintosh. 410. Lon-in spite of all our admiration for Mr. Fox, we don. 1934 the Greeks, and of Fox among the orators of England,-reason penetrated, and if we may venture on the expression, made red-hot by passion. But this is not the kind of excellence proper to history; and it is hardly too much to say, that whatever is strikingly good in Mr. Fox's Fragment is out of place. With Sir James Mackintosh the case was reversed. His proper place was his library, a circle of men of letters, or a chair of moral and political philosophy. He distinguished himself highly in Parliament. But nevertheless Parliament was not exactly the sphere for him. The effect of his most successful speeches was small, when compared with the quantity of ability and learning which was expended on them. We could easily name men who, not possessing a tenth part of his cannot but think that his extreme attention to | parts of the History of James II. fine spec the petty niceties of language was hardly mens of that which we conceive to have been worthy of so manly and so capacious an un- the great characteristic of Demosthenes among derstanding. There were purists of this kind at Rome; and their fastidiousness was censured by Horace with that perfect good sense and good taste which characterize all his writings. There were purists of this kind at the time of the revival of letters: and the two greatest scholars of that time raised their voices, the one from within, the other from without the Alps, against a scrupulosity so unreasonable. "Carent," said Politian, "quæ scribunt isti viribus et vita, carent actu, carent affectu, carent indole. Nisi liber ille præsto sit ex quo quid excerpant, colligere tria verba non possunt. . . Horum semper igitur oratio tremula, vacillans, infirma. Quæso ne ista superstitione te alliges. ... Út bene currere non potest qui pedum ponere studet in alienis tantum vestigiis, ita nec bene scribere qui tanquam de præ-intellectual powers, hardly ever address the scripto non audet egredi.”—“ Posthac," exclaims Erasmus, "non licebit episcopos appellare patres reverendos, nec in calce literarum scribere annum a Christo nato, quod id nusquam faciat Cicero. Quid autem ineptius quam, toto seculo novato, religione, imperiis, magistratibus, locorum vocabulis, ædificiis, cultu, moribus, non aliter audere loqui quam locutus est Cicero? Si revivisceret, ipse Cicero, rideret hoc Ciceronianorum genus." House of Commons without producing a greater impression than was produced by his most splendid and elaborate orations. His luminous and philosophical disquisition on the Reform Bill was spoken to empty benches. Those, indeed, who had the wit to keep their seats, picked up hints which, skilfully used, made the fortune of more than one speech. But "it was caviare to the general." And even those who listened to Sir James with pleasure and admiration, could not but acknowledge that he rather lectured than debated. An artist who should waste on a panorama, on a scene, or on a transparency, the exquisite finishing which we admire in some of the small Dutch While Mr. Fox winnowed and sifted his phraseology with a care, which seems hardly consistent with the simplicity and elevation of his mind, and of which the effect really was to debase and enfeeble his style, he was little on his guard against those more serious improprie-interiors, would not squander his powers more ties of manner into which a great orator, who than this eminent man too often did. His auundertakes to write history, is in danger of dience resembled the boy in the "Heart of Midfalling. There is about the whole book a ve- Lothian," who pushes away the lady's guineas hement, contentious, replying manner. Almost with contempt, and insists on having the white every argument is put in the form of an inter-money. They preferred the silver with which rogation, an ejaculation, or a sarcasm. The writer seems to be addressing himself to some imaginary audience; to be tearing in pieces a defence of the Stuarts which has just been pronounced by an imaginary Tory. Take, for example, his answer to Hume's remarks on the execution of Sydney; and substitute "the honourable gentleman," or "the noble lord," for the name of Hume. The whole passage sounds like a powerful reply, thundering at three in the morning from the Opposition Bench. While we read it, we can almost fancy that we see and hear the great English debater, such as he has been described to us by the few who can still remember the Westminster Scrutiny, and the Oczakow Negotiations, in the full paroxysm of inspiration, foaming, screaming, choked by the rushing multitude of his words. It is true that the passage to which we have referred, and several other passages which we could point out, are admirable, when considered merely as exhibitions of mental power. We at once recognise that consummate master of the whole art of intellectual gladiatorship, whose Speeches, imperfectly as they have been transmitted to us, should be studied day and night by every man who wishes to learn the science of legical defence. We find in several they were familiar, and which they were con stantly passing about from hand to hand, to the gold which they had never before seen, and with the value of which they were unacquainted. It is much to be regretted, we think, that Sir James Mackintosh did not wholly devote his later years to philosophy and literature. His talents were not those which enable a speaker to produce with rapidity a series of striking but transitory impressions, to excite the minds of five hundred gentlemen at midnight, without saying any thing that any one of them will be able to remember in the morning. His argu ments were of a very different texture from those which are produced in Parliament at a moment's notice,-which puzzle a plain man who, if he had them before him in writing, would soon detect their fallacy, and which the great debater who employed them forgets within half an hour, and never thinks of again. Whatever was valuable in the compositions of Sir James Mackintosh, was the ripe fruit of study and of meditation. It was the same with his conversation. In his most familiar talk there was no wildness, no inconsistency, no amusing nonsense, no exaggeration for the sake of momentary effect. His mind was a vast magazine, admirably arranged; every We have no hesitation in pronouncing this Fragment decidedly the best history now extant of the reign of James the Second. It con tains much new and curious information, of which excellent use has been made. The ac curacy of the narrative is deserving of high admiration. We have noticed only one mistake of the smallest importance, and that, we believe, is to be laid to the charge of the editor, who has far more serious blunders to answer for. The pension of 60,000 livres, which Lord Sunderland received from France, is said to have been equivalent to 2,500l. sterling. Sir James had perhaps for a moment forgotten,his editor had certainly never heard,—that a great depreciation of the French coin took place after 1688. When Sunderland was in power, the livre was worth about eighteen pence, and his pension consequently amounted to about 4,500. This is really the only inac curacy of the slightest moment that we have been able to discover in several attentive perusals. thing was there, and every thing was in its We are not sure that the book is not in some degree open to the charge which the idle citizen in the Spectator brought against his pud"Mem. too many plums, and no suet." There is perhaps too much disquisition and too little narrative; and, indeed, this is the fault into which, judging from the habits of Sir James's mind, we should have thought him most likely to fall. What we assuredly did not anticipate was, that the narrative would be better executed than the disquisitions. We The intellectual and moral qualities which expected to find, and we have found, many just are most important in an historian, he possessed delineations of character, and many digres in a very high degree. He was singularly sions full of interest, such as the account mild, calm, and impartial, in his judgments of of the order of Jesuits, and of the state of men and of parties. Almost all the distin- prison discipline in England a hundred and guished writers who have treated of English fifty years ago. We expected to find, and we history are advocates. Mr. Hallam and Sir have found, many reflections breathing the James Mackintosh are alone entitled to be spirit of a calm and benignant philosophy. call d judges. But the extreme austerity of But we did not, we own, expect to find that Mr. Hallam takes away something from the Sir James could tell a story as well as Voltaire pleasure of reading his learned, eloquent, and or Hume. Yet such is the fact; and if any judicious writings. He is a judge, but a hang-person doubts it, we would advise him to read ing judge, the Page or Buller of the high court the account of the events which followed the of literary justice. His black cap is in con-issuing of King James's famous declaration,-stant requisition. In the long calendar of the meeting of the clergy, the violent scene at these whom he has tried, there is hardly one the Privy Council, the commitment, trial, an who has not, ir spite of evidence to charac-acquittal of the bishops. The most superficial ter and recommendations to mercy, been sen-reader must be charmed, we think, by the livetenced and left for execution. Sir James, perhaps, erred a little on the other side. He liked a maiden assize, and came away with white gloves, after sitting in judgment on batches of the most notorious offenders. He had a quick eye for the redeeming parts of a character, and a large toleration for the infirmities of men exposed to strong temptations. But this lenity did not arise from ignorance or neglect of moral distinctions. Though he allowed, perhaps, too much weight to every extenuating circumstance that could be urged in favour of the transgressor, he never disputed the authority of the law, or showed his ingenuity by refining away its enactments. On every occasion he showed himself firm wnere principles were in question, but full of charity icwards individuals. liness of the narrative. But no person who is not acquainted with that vast mass of intractable materials, of which the valuable and inte. resting part has been extracted and condensed, can fully. appreciate the skill of the writer. Here, and indeed throughout the book, we find many harsh and careless expressions, which the author would probably have removed if he had lived to complete his work. But, in spite of these blemishes, we must say that we should find it difficult to point out, in any modern nistorian, any passage of equal length, and at the same time of equal merit. We find in it the diligence, the accuracy, and the judgment of Hallam, united to the vivacity and the colour. ing of Southev. A history of England, written througnout in tnis manner, would be the mos fascinating book in the language. It would be more in request at the circulating libraries than | shock us more than this Supplement. The the last novel. Sir James was not, we think, gifted with poetical imagination. But the lower kind of imagination which is necessary to the historian, he had in large measure. It is not the business of the historian to create new worlds and to people them with new races of beings. He is to Homer and Shakspeare, to Dante and Milton, what Nollekens was to Canova, or Lawrence to Michel Angelo. The object of the historian's imagination is not within him; it is furnished from without. It is not a vision of beauty and grandeur discernible only by the eye of his own mind; but a real model which he did not make, and which he cannot alter. Yet his is not a mere mechanical imitation. The triumph of his skill is to select such parts as may produce the effect of the whole, to bring out strongly all the characteristic features, and to throw the light and shade in such a manner as may heighten the effect. This skill, as far as we can judge from the unfinished work now before us, Sir James Mackintosh possessed in an eminent degree. Memoir contains much that is worth read ing; for it contains many extracts from the compositions of Sir James Mackintosh. But when we pass from what the biographer has done with his scissors, to what he has done with his pen, we find nothing worthy of appro bation. Instead of confining himself to the only work which he is competent to perform→ that of relating facts in plain words--he fa vours us with his opinions about Lord Bacon, and about the French literature of the age of Louis XIV.; and with opinions, more absurd still, about the poetry of Homer, whom it is evident, from his criticisms, that he cannot read in the original. He affects, and for aught we know, feels something like contempt for the celebrated man whose life he has under taken to write, and whom he was incompetent to serve in the capacity even of a corrector of the press. Our readers may form a notion of the spirit in which the whole narrative is com. posed, from expressions which occur at the beginning. This biographer tells us that Mackintosh, on occasion of taking his medical deThe style of this Fragment is weighty, man- gree at Edinburgh, "not only put off the writing ly, and unaffected. There are, as we have of his Thesis to the last moment, but was an said, some expressions which seem to us hour behind his time on the day of examinaharsh, and some which we think inaccurate. tion, and kept the Academic Senate waiting These would probably have been corrected, if for him in full conclave." This irregularity, Sir James had lived to superintend the publi- which no sensible professor would have thought cation. We ought to add that the printer has deserving of more than a slight reprimand, is by no means done his duty. One misprint in described by the biographer, after a lapse of particular is so serious as to require notice. nearly half a century, as an incredible instance Sir James Mackintosh has paid a high and "not so much of indolence as of gross negli just tribute to the genius, the integrity, and gence and bad taste." But this is not all. Our the courage of a good and great man, a dis- biographer has contrived to procure a copy of tinguished ornament of English literature, a the Thesis, and has sate down with his As in fearless champion of English liberty, Thomas præsenti and his Propria quæ maribus at his side, Burnet, Master of the Charter-House, and au- to pick out blunders in a composition written thor of that most eloquent and imaginative by a youth of twenty-one, on the occasion al work, the Telluris Theoria Sacra. Wherever luded to. He finds one mistake-such a misthe name of this celebrated man occurs, it is take as the greatest scholar might commit when printed "Bennet," both in the text and in the in haste, and as the veriest schoolboy would index. This cannot be mere negligence: it is detect when at leisure. He glories over this plain that Thomas Burnet and his writings precious discovery with all the exultation of a were never heard of by the gentleman who has pedagogue. "Deceived by the passive termibeen employed to edite this volume; and who, nation of the deponent verb defungor, Mackinnot content with deforming Sir James Mackintosh misuses it in a passive sense." He is tosh's text by such blunders, has prefixed to it a calumnious Memoir, has appended to it a most unworthy Continuation, and has thus succeeded in expanding the volume into one of the thickest, and debasing it into one of the worst that we ever saw. Never did we see so admirable an illustration of the old Greek proverb, which tells us that half is sometimes more than the whole. Never did we see a case in which the increase of the bulk was so evidently a diminution of the value. Why such an artist was selected to deface so fine a Torso, we cannot pretend to conjecture. We read that, when the Consul Mummius, after the taking of Corinth, was preparing to send to Rome some works of the greatest Grecian sculptors, he toid the packers that if they broke his Venus or his Apollo, he would force them to restore the limbs which should be wanting. A head by a hewer of milestones, joined to a borom by Praxiteles. would not surprise or not equally fortunate in his other discovery. "Laude conspurcare," whatever he may think, is not an improper phrase. Mackintosh me ant to say that there are men whose praise is a disgrace. No person, we are sure, who has read this Memoir, will doubt that there are men whose abuse is an honour. But we must proceed to more important matters. This writer evidently wishes to im press his readers with a belief that Sir James Mackintosh, from interested motives, abandoned the doctrines of the "Vindiciae Gallica." Had his statements appeared in their natural place, we should leave them to their natu ral fate. We would not stoop to defend Sir James Mackintosh from the attacks of fourthrate magazines and pothouse newspapers. But here his own fame is turned against him. A book, of which not one copy would ever have been bought but for his name in the title-page, is made the vehicle of the siander. Under such circumstances we cannot help exclaiming, in the words of one of the most amiable of Homer's heroes, “ Νυν τις ενηειης Πατροκληος δειλοιο Μνησάσθω, πασιν γαρ επίστατο μείλιχος είναι Le vice fondamental des théories sur les con stitutions politiques, c'est de commencer par attaquer celles qui existent, et d'exciter tout au moins des inquiétudes et des jalousies de pouvoir. Une telle disposition n'est point favor able au perfectionnement des lois. La seule époque où l'on puisse entreprendre avec suc cès de grandes réformes de législation, est celle où les passions publiques sont calmes, et où le gouvernement jouit de la stabilité la plus grande. L'objet de M. Bentham, en cherchant dans le vice des lois la cause de la plupart des maux, a été constamment d'éloigner le plus grand de tous, le bouleversement de l'autorité, les révolutions de propriété et de pouvoir." To so conservative a frame of mind had the excesses of the French Revolution brought the most uncompromising reformers of that time. And why is one person to be singled out from among millions and arraigned before posterity as a traitor to his opinions, only because events produced on him the effect which they pro We have no difficulty in admitting that, during the ten or twelve years which followed the appearance of the "Vindiciae Gallica," the opinions of Sir James Mackintosh underwent some change. But did this change pass on him alone? Was it not common? Was it not almost universal? Was there one honest friend of liberty in Europe or in America whose ardour had not been damped, whose faith in the high destinies of mankind had not been shaken? Was there one observer to whom the French Revolution, or revolutions in general, appeared exactly in the same light on the day when the Bastille fell and on the day when the Girondists were dragged to the scaffold-the day when the Directory shipped off their principal opponent for Guiana, or the day when the Legislative Body was driven from its hall at the point of the bayonet? We do not speak of enthu-duced on a whole generation? This biographer siastic and light-minded people-of wits like may, for aught we know, have revelations from Sheridan, or poets like Alfieri, but of the most Heaven like Mr. Percival, or pure anticipated virtuous and intelligent practical statesmen, cognitions like the disciples of Kant. But such and of the deepest, the calmest, the most im- poor creatures as Mackintosh, Dumont, and partial political speculators of that time. What Bentham had nothing but observation and reawas the language and conduct of Lord Spen- son to guide them, and they obeyed the guidance ser, of Lord Fitzwilliam, of Mr. Grattan? What of observation and reason. How is it in phy is the tone of Dumont's Memoirs, written just sics? A traveller falls in with a fruit which at the close of the eighteenth century? What he had never before seen. He tastes it, and Tory could have spoken with greater disgust finds it sweet and refreshing. He praises it, and contempt of the French Revolution and its and resolves to introduce it into his own counauthors? Nay, this writer, a republican, and try. But in a few minutes he is taken violently the most upright and zealous of republicans, sick; he is convulsed; he is at the point of has gone so far as to say that Mr. Burke's death; no medicine gives him relief. He of work on the Revolution had saved Europe. course pronounces this delicious food a poison, The name of M. Dumont naturally suggests blames his own folly in tasting it, and cautions that of Mr. Bentham. He, we presume, was not his friends against it. After a long and violent ratting for a place; and what language did he struggle he recovers, and finds himself much hold at that time? Look at his little treatise exhausted by his sufferings, but free from some entitled "Sophismes Anarchiques." In that trea- chronic complaints which had been the torment tise he says, that the atrocities of the Revolu- of his life. He then changes his opinion again, tion were the natural consequences of the ab- and pronounces this fruit a very powerful resurd principles on which it was commenced;-medy, which ought to be employed only in exthat while the chiefs of the constituent assem-treme cases, and with great caution, but which bly gloried in the thought that they were pull-ought not to be absolutely excluded from the ing down an aristocracy, they never saw that "Pharmacopoeia." And would it not be the their doctrines tended to produce an evil a height of absurdity to call such a man fickle hundred times more formidable-anarchy; and inconsistent because he had repeatedly that the theory laid down in the "Declaration altered his judgment? If he had not altered of the Rights of Man" had, in a great measure, his judgment, would he have been a rational troduced the crimes of the Reign of Terror;--being? It was exactly the same with the hat none but an eye-witness could imagine French Revolution. That event was a new the horrors of a state of society in which comments on that Declaration were put forth by men with no food in their bellies, with rags on their backs, and with arms in their hands. He praises the English Parliament for the dislike which it has always shown to abstract reasonings, and to the affirming of general principles. In M. Dumont's preface to the "Treatise on the Principles of Legislation"--a preface written under the eye of Mr. Bentham and published with his sanction--are the following still more remarkable expressions :-" M. Bentham est bien loin d'attacher une préférence exclusive phenomenon in politics. Nothing that nad gone before enabled any person to judge with certainty of the course which affairs might take. At first the effect was the reform of great abuses, and honest men rejoiced. Then came commotion, proscription, confiscation, the bank ruptcy, the assignats, the maximum, civil war foreign war, revolutionary tribunals, guillotin ades, noyades, fusillades. Yet a little while, and a military despotism rose out of the con fusion, and threatened the independence of every state in Europe. And yet again a litte while, and the old dynasty returned, followed |